Skip to main content

Soil Power!

To follow up on the article on the projected maize and wheat production in the world due to climate change, New York times has this article by Jacques Leslie that provides a possible solution to both potentials food shortage and global warming. The author describes how a method of carbon sequestration can help solve both.

"Now scientists are documenting how sequestering carbon in soil can produce a double dividend: It reduces climate change by extracting carbon from the atmosphere, and it restores the health of degraded soil and increases agricultural yields. Many scientists and farmers believe the emerging understanding of soil’s role in climate stability and agricultural productivity will prompt a paradigm shift in agriculture,..."

The article is pretty loaded with one of the solution that have become popular among environmental scientists. Read and ask any questions you might have.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to UNESCO!

Hi everyone! My name is Henry Dong, and I'm going to be your head chair this year for UNESCO. I'm super stoked to meet you all in March, but I'll take a quick moment to introduce myself. I'm currently a junior here at Berkeley, but I'm originally from Irvine, which is located in Orange County in Southern California. At Berkeley, I'm studying Molecular and Cell Biology and Cognitive Science, and my overall interests include healthcare, education, and technology. Outside of classes, I love swimming, rock-climbing, listening to music, and watching Hulu/Netflix. I also enjoy playing basketball, and can occasionally get carried away watching it. Personally, I found MUN to be one of my most formative high school experiences, and I joined BMUN because I was looking for a similar kind of community. I'm really excited to hear all the ideas that you're going to bring to BMUN LXVI, and I look forward to getting to know you all!

CRISPR and genome edited crops - what it means for agriculture

In the last few years, you may have heard the term “CRISPR” – pronounced ‘crisper’ – pop up a few times. But what exactly is CRISPR, and why is it so important? Well, in order to answer that, let’s first pay a quick visit to 2012. That was the year that Jennifer Doudna – a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley – and her team characterized the activity of what’s now known as CRISPR-cas9. The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology and CRISPR Associated System (cas) was first discovered in bacteria as a defense against foreign viruses and DNA. Eventually, its use progressed into eukaryotic cells for purposes of modification, as the technology was adapted by the Broad Institute for genetic engineering. So how is this accomplished? Basically, CRISPR-cas9 consists of two main parts: the cas9 enzyme, which is capable of cutting DNA at specific locations within the genome – think of pair of molecular scissors – and

Water in Iran

            As we have read in the topic synopsis and previous blog posts, droughts and famines can bring political unrest with them. Scientists point out that these events will only become more common and extreme with climate change. Many parts of the world are currently under drought, and one of those places in Iran. This has been one of the driest years in recent history for Iran and the future doesn’t look much better as it is predicted that Iran will close the rain year at 80% below average rainfall. Iran’s Drought and Crisis Management Center has declared that 96% of Iran’s land is under “prolonged drought conditions.”             One of the biggest problems that this drought has brought to Iran is water scarcity. Farmers in rural areas do not have enough water to farm and as the LA Times article points out, there have been protests by farmers who feel that the government is not addressing their problems. There was one instance when communities in the mount